Spores made to order

MANMADE spores, replicas of one of nature's most resilient creations, have been built in the lab using an ingenious technique in which the porous, hollow particles assemble themselves. Among a host of potential uses, their creators suggest they could deliver measured drug doses or make drugs inhalable.

Spores are extremely stable structures made by some lower plants, fungi and protozoans. The spores of the perennial plant Selaginella are so robust their remains have survived 50 million years. Till now it has been almost impossible to mimic their structure from scratch, but botanist Alan Hemsley and chemist Peter Griffiths at Cardiff University in the UK had a hunch that the unusual behaviour of "colloidal" particles could provide the key.

Colloids are made up of very fine particles of one substance held in another. Though they are not true solutions, the particles never separate out and cannot be filtered off. Examples of ...

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